Are Smartphones Helping Stop Police Violence?
The smartphones that captured the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of law enforcement could have belonged to anyone. They were likely of similar make and model to the phones that captured the Dallas Police Department’s fatal shootout with a sniper following protests against police violence the same week. These phones, available via any number of payment plans and one-time offers, are responsible for a new normal. One in which footage of police officers shooting scores of unarmed black men, or engaged in a shootout with a deranged ex-military sniper, is part of the public record.
It’s difficult to overstate how radically smartphones have transformed the ways we attempt to hold police accountable for their actions. From the recorded death of Eric Garner, to the live-streamed final moments of Philando Castile’s life, smartphone cameras have increased the scope and immediacy of transparency following instances of police violence. With such unprecedented access to victim’s accounts of the story — often distorted in the “official” narrative — it’s tempting to see this new normal as unambiguously good. After all, it’d be reasonable to expect footage of the death of Tamir Rice — a 12-year-old boy who was playing in a park with a toy gun before being gunned down by officers seconds after their arrival — to bring about the changes in America’s police force that activists have been demanding for decades. But as the number of videos of black men dying at the hands of police increase, and meaningful policy change remains stagnant, a new question becomes inescapable: Is this working?
What’s more, the individuals who share these harrowing videos — without which Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling would be nothing more than names on the long list of black people murdered by police — often face severe persecution for sharing documentation of police misconduct.
Chris LeDay was one of the first people to post the video of Alton Sterling’s fatal encounter with Baton Rouge police on Facebook. LeDay, a 34-year-old ground equipment technician, was handcuffed and shackled at his job at Dobbins Air Reserve Base just 24 hours after posting the graphic video of Sterling’s death. LeDay claimed on Facebook that he was told he “fit the description” of someone wanted for an assault and battery charge in another town. According to LeDay, it wasn’t until later that police told him he was being arrested for failing to pay outstanding traffic tickets.
“They totally overlook the fact that I was arrested for ‘fitting the description’ and ‘you have an assault and battery charge in Dunwoody, GA’ which by the way I HAVE NEVER COMMITED OR EVEN HEARD OF ….. and go straight to ‘well you shoulda paid those traffic tickets’ really?” he wrote on Facebook. “Lmao really? Lol wow!!! Yeah trafffic tickets will get you 25 to Life I guess.”
Following the death of Eric Garner, and the national uproar surrounding accountability in policing, the NYPD released a perfectly unsavory video from Garner’s neighborhood. In it, a pair of would-be rappers filming a music video inside of a local bodega shoot each other over a drunken argument. The dramatic footage, released under the auspices that the police needed help finding the shooter, fit conspicuously into the official counter-narrative around Eric Garner’s death, that “these communities” are dangerous and police have no choice but to use deadly force.
Not to mention, the man that recorded Garner’s killing, Ramsey Orta, claims to have become a target of the NYPD. Orta currently faces up to four years in prison after taking a plea deal on a weapons and drug charge. Diamond Reynolds, the woman who remained perfectly composed while detailing the horrendous last moments of her fiancé Philando Castile’s life on Facebook, says she was arrested after the incident and detained — without access to her child — for most of the night.
If our smartphones, seamlessly connected to the world at large, are our best resource in a David versus Goliath battle against the establishment, they seem to be no match for the sophisticated surveillance and public relations networks available to the police. Just last week, in a televised town-hall on race and policing, the President answered questions from the mother of the police officer responsible for the death of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who, when shot several times in the back by police in South Carolina, was fleeing in the opposite direction from the officer. Erica Garner, the eldest daughter of Eric Garner, was also in attendance. She was not invited to ask any questions.
In the 1990s, IBM researchers studied the effects of individual grains of sand being added to a pile, one by one, to parse out the exact moment the pile collapsed. The experiment — a test of an earlier hypothesis developed by Chinese researchers — set out to discover the impact of individual changes within a system. In their 2015 book, Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance, Amsterdam-based design studio Metahaven linger on this experiment, and trace the effect of similar cascades of information on systems of government — how many leaks until the system changes?
Metahaven’s winding narrative follows the structure and dissemination of WikiLeaks cables, as well as the information revealed by the former NSA analyst Edward Snowden. The picture we get of these whistleblowers isn’t necessarily that of freedom fighters caught in a struggle for a better world, but something much more complicated. How does one determine, for example, what information won’t be worse off in the public knowledge than not? There is the argument, too, that information in the wrong hands — like those of ISIS — only further stifles progress.
Footage of police violence, the existence of which is in many ways a state secret, could undergo the same scrutiny. Following the graphic footage of Alton Sterling’s death — and Philando Castile’s the very next day — questions arose about the psychological implications of witnessing, with such frequency and detail, the destruction of black bodies. The gasping last breaths of Castile, captured by his fiancé Diamond Reynolds, is a horrifying primer on what it’s like to see a black man die — one that surely affects the public consciousness as it streams to millions of screens around the country.
In an interview with the German magazine 032c, Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven describe WikiLeaks’ similarly precarious position. “In the mid-2000s there were many theories about information cascades bringing about forms of change. Organizations like WikiLeaks were built around these ideas,” they explain. “The tricky bit is that one never can know exactly where the change will lead to, and if and how it will backfire.”
The tech industry was swift in its self-congratulation for their part in the dissemination of videos capturing police violence. Facebook, following Diamond Reynolds’ widely viewed live stream of the final moments of Philando Castile’s life (and after they swiftly removed and then re-uploaded the footage), officially made graphic content that “raises awareness” permissible on the platform. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement,
“The images we’ve seen this week are graphic and heartbreaking, and they shine a light on the fear that millions of members of our community live with every day. While I hope we never have to see another video like Diamond’s, it reminds us why coming together to build a more open and connected world is so important — and how far we still have to go.”
Facebook, along with the other tech companies that took vocal, and public, stances on Black Lives Matter, are themselves part of the apparatus that makes a movement like BLM necessary. In 2012, the NYPD began an all-out assault on gangs across the city with Operation Crew Cut. The main tool of the operation’s activities is the sweeping surveillance of the social media presence of individuals as young as 10 years old. Google, for its part, continues to offer services to over twenty law-enforcement agencies currently under investigation by The Department of Justice — including Oakland.
Whether or not videos of police violence bring about any effective change is entirely besides the point to the tech industry — where, it should be noted, very few black people work. What’s more important is that they become part of a narrative that places their products, Periscope or Facebook Live, at the center.
“When somebody becomes a whistleblower, they can reveal information of companies or states, but at the same time these companies or states are already enacting surveillance on their subjects. So it’s a double-bind.” Metahaven goes on to say in their interview. “There’s all kinds of speech acts and modes of vision at work at the same time.”
For those looking to hold the police accountable for their actions, sharing video evidence of their misconduct to hundreds of thousands of people on social media feels like the only choice. Unfortunately, reality might be more dire. Simply put, exposing police departments’ with video evidence probably won’t work — the question now is, what will?
